Weapons

Note: The summer weather is currently playing havoc with my health, so blog posts may be sparse until the air cools and the leaves start to get crunchy

Is it unfair to judge something based on its marketing? If the trailers for a movie seem to be promising one thing, and the movie delivers something very different, is that a justifiable reason for a viewer to be disappointed?

It feels like the sophisticated answer is to say no, we should judge a work on what it is rather than what we wanted it to be, and anyway the people making a piece of commercial art usually don’t have any say in the marketing. But on the other hand, marketing is supposed to give people an idea of whether they might like something. I appreciate it when trailers don’t spoil the whole movie, and I’ve been delighted in the past by a film that turns out to be hiding depths not suggested by its advertising campaign… but that’s very different from a situation where a movie’s trailers seem designed to make it appear to be something it’s not.

Case in point: Zach “Whitest Kids You Know” Cregger’s Weapons was firmly marketed as a horror movie. I would argue that while it’s an entertaining and well-made film, it is not much of a horror movie.

Let’s rewind a bit. Cregger came onto the scene in 2022 with Barbarian. A lot of people liked this movie. I did not, largely because it opens with a “fake” premise and then swerves hard in an unexpected direction, and I ended up feeling like the fake premise was more interesting than what the movie actually delivered. Both parts of the movie are definitely in the horror genre; it’s just that the “real” plot is a very different kind of horror than what the movie initially sets the audience up to expect.

Weapons is kind of an inversion of this: it’s not that the movie’s plot is different from what it initially suggests, but rather that its genre is.

The best way I can illustrate this is by contrasting the movie’s first teaser with its opening scenes. In the #viral mysterious ARG-esque trailer that all horror movies are required to have now, we see eerie footage of children Naruto-running from their homes in the middle of the night. The tone is restrained, subtle, creepy. Exactly the kind of thing I crave for my daily well-being! Let’s go, Zach Cregger!

In the actual movie, this footage is a slow-motion montage paired with George Harrison’s Beware of Darkness. It’s a cool scene, I guess, but it’s not remotely creepy, nor is it attempting to be. It’s quirky, it’s kind of wacky, it’s…a little bit funny?

And that’s the actual tone of Weapons. If you forced me to put it into only one genre, no crossovers or hyphenations, I would say it’s far more of a dark comedy than it is a horror movie, not only in terms of execution but also intent. The movie is sometimes trying to scare the viewer, and it is at times damn good at doing that…but it’s hard to get invested in any of those scares when you know the next scene is going to be a smugly clever musical needle drop, or something that starts out scary before descending into farce. Uncommitted as it is to delivering scares, the movie simply can’t sustain any kind of dread or tension, with the result that watching it is like riding a roller coaster that keeps gently levelling out before the big drop.

Ah, but! I can already hear the counter-arguments coming. You see, you absolute rube, comedy and horror are actually the same thing, so it’s totally fine to ruin your groundbreaking horror imagery with cheesy over the top bullshit! Straightforward horror is so blasé, the real cinemistes know that Evil Dead-esque slapstick nonsense is how you deliver true horror!

…Okay, yes, I am to an extent making up a guy to get mad at here, but the points I have semi-facetiously put into my imaginary interlocuter’s mouth aren’t that far removed from the kinds of opinions I regularly see in horror fandom spaces (usually from people who use phrases like “hellacious” and “face melters” to describe movies). “Comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin” is one of those media opinions I get the feeling people say because they’ve heard other people saying it, not because they’ve thought about and decided that it’s actually true. Personally, I have never seen an attempt at mixing the two genres that didn’t just dilute both.

(No, Shaun of the Dead doesn’t count. That’s not a horror movie, it’s a comedy that has zombies in it. Something doesn’t become horror just because it features Halloween monsters).

I don’t think Weapons’ comedy stylings would bother me nearly so much if it wasn’t so genuinely good at being scary when it wants to. There’s some wild shit in here, but it’s all delivered with the over-excited enthusiasm of a child jumping out a closet and shooting their parent in the face with a water gun. It’s “scary”, but it’s never eerie or creepy or tense, because it’s too busy yelling “LOOK AT THIS LOOK HOW CRAZY THIS IS DID YOU SEE THAT HUH DID YOU ARE YOU SCREAMING AND/OR LAUGHING YET???”

Okay, I’ve been ranting incoherently for a while now. What is Weapons actually about? This is one of those Mr. Police I Gave You All The Clues situations where if you were conscious during the movie’s marketing campaign you probably already know, but just in case, here’s the short version: at 02:17 in a quiet American town, every child except for one in a particular elementary school class runs out of their home and into the night. This causes a lot of consternation, largely aimed at the class’s teacher.

I say “sort of” because the movie is actually much more an ensemble, telling its story via a series of criss-crossing perspectives that often jump back a bit in time to fill in gaps in the preceding chunk of narrative. This is a neat way to structure a movie, and it does a great job of keeping the pacing tight since there’s never anything that feels like it’s just filling up space, but it does lead to some problems with its characters.

The teacher seems like she’s being positioned as the movie’s protagonist, or at least its central focus, but then she disappears from the story for a long time. In fact, there’s a pretty big chunk in the middle where the movie seems to have dropped most of the plot thread established early on completely. That isn’t actually the case, it does tie everything together in the end, but by that point our nominal main character has been absent for so long that she feels like a stranger in her own story. There is another quasi-protagonist that the movie shifts focus on to take up the slack, but he comes in a little too late to ever feel like a fully-rounded character.

The way the movie is structured actually reminded me a lot of a Stephen King novel, in that it’s a multi-POV affair taking place in a small American town. The difference is that King novels will generally come back to the characters they set up earlier instead of just passing the baton and turning them into side-characters in someone else’s story. There probably isn’t enough time to do that in a two-hour movie, but that’s just a reason not to use this format in the first place.

Another similarity to Stephen King is that the villain is an over-the-top cartoon whose appearance and mannerisms completely suck any fear out of the story. She’s unnerving and foreboding when you’re just getting brief glimpses of her, but eventually she comes on-stage fully and starts talking, and then there’s no going back.

Oh, and she’s another fucking witch.

I am officially calling a moratorium an occult horror for at least the next five years. We’re done with the fucking salt circles and spooky twigs. Give me cryptids, or aliens, or vampires. I’ll even take a resurgence in serial killers. Just something, anything, where the reveal isn’t “it was a demon” or “it was a creepy old woman.” Enough of that shit.

Weapons, you might be able to tell, got me quite steamed. There’s nothing I hate more than a unique horror premise turning into something formulaic and over the top, and so far Zach Cregger has given me precisely that twice in a row. I think his upcoming Resident Evil movie looks cool, but is that what the film is actually going to be like? Is it going to turn into something goofy and over the top halfway through? I really hope not, but I’ve now been burned twice, and I’m wary.